Once Bitten (5 page)

“What are you going to do next?” I asked.

“Ask her about the knife that's missing from the set in her kitchen. Ask her what she was doing in the alley. You know, Doc, police-type questions, just like you see on the television.”

Filbin slammed down the phone. “Jerk,” he said.

“That's no way to talk to Jamie D. Beaverbrook, world renowned vampire hunter,” admonished De'Ath.

“I didn't mean this jerk,” said Filbin. "I meant those guys in Forensic. Had her clothes arrived?

Don't forget to sign for them. Don't forget to send back the paperwork. Teaching their grandmothers to suck eggs."

There was a blue file on Filbin's desk and I could see a colour photograph peeping out. He saw me looking and pushed it across the desk at me. “Scene of crime pics,” he said. “Not for the faint hearted.”

“Mind if I look?” I said, more to keep De'Ath happy than anything else. He sometimes got a bit ratty if I took liberties.

Both men nodded. I pulled up a chair and sat down. There were a dozen or so glossy photographs, each twelve inches by ten inches. Some were close-ups of the victim's face. He seemed to be about forty years old, his hair in a military-looking crew cut, his eyes blank and staring. There was a savage cut in his throat reaching from his windpipe up to his right ear. Other photographs showed his blood-soaked chest, though it was difficult to see where the knife had gone in.

One of the phones rang and De'Ath picked it up.

The victim was wearing a suit, not the grey one I'd seen in the dream but a brown and yellow checked one. He was wearing a red tie and there was a matching red handkerchief sprouting out of his top pocket. Both were the same colour as the blood over his neck and chest. I flicked through the photographs, knowing what I was looking for but not wanting to admit it to myself. One of the pictures was a full length shot of the body. I could see the brown shoes and I scrutinised the socks.

They were red. They were not black with white triangles. I sighed and sat back in the chair.

De'Ath replaced the receiver. “Coroner's office,” he said to Filbin. “Autopsy'll go ahead this afternoon. I'm going to have a chat with young Miss Ferriman. Can you hit the phones and nail down a supplier of the those knife sets. What was the brand? Dick, wasn't it?”

Filbin nodded. “Yeah, Dick. Some German company.”

“OK, you know what we want. Number of sets sold in the LA area, and we want a set so that we can identify the one that was missing from her kitchen.“ De'Ath looked at me. ”You still here?” he asked.

“No I'm a hologram,” I answered. “I left an hour ago.”

A uniformed sergeant came banging through the door, a large plastic bag in one hand. He dropped the bag on Filbin's desk and thrust a clipboard under the Irish detective's nose.

“You've gotta sign for these,” he rasped.

“What is it, my laundry?” asked Filbin.

"Don't piss me about, Filbin. They're Ferriman's clothes, from Forensic. Just sign your name.

You can manage joined-up writing, can't you?"

Filbin sighed and took a pen off his desk and scrawled on the clipboard while I reached for the bag. Inside there was a white t-shirt, a pair of black high-heeled boots, white briefs and bra, a black miniskirt, and a black leather motorcycle jacket. I took out the jacket and held it up. There was nothing unusual about it, you saw ones just like it every time you walked down the street, big collar, lots of zips, belt around the bottom. You know the sort. The sort she was wearing in the dream.

The sergeant with the clipboard walked away. Over his shoulder he shouted "by the way, Doc,

you know the Batmobile's got a ticket?"

“This isn't a boutique,” said De'Ath and he took the jacket off me and pushed it back into the bag.

“What are you going to do with them?” I asked.

“She's not been charged yet, so she's free to wear her own clothes,” he said. He swung the bag off the desk and took it with him to the interview rooms. As he went through the double doors,

Captain Canonico came barrelling into the Homicide office like a frigate under full steam.

“Beaverbrook, got your crucifix and stake with you?” he bellowed.

“Morning Captain,” I said, my heart heavy.

He charged over to where I was sitting, put his hands on the desk and loomed over me like a storm about to break. “Have I got a scumball for you,” he said. “We pulled him in about half an hour ago. He killed two small boys last night. Tortured them with a soldering iron. And then bit their peckers off. Can you believe that? Bit them clean off and swallowed them. Said it would boost his potency. You know what I'd do to someone like him, Beaverbrook? I'd hack off his balls with a blunt hacksaw and lock him away for life. That's what I'd do. But you, Beaverbrook, maybe you'll think he's just a bit disturbed and that we should put him in a nice hospital somewhere and let him take woodwork classes and go for long walks in the fresh air. Anyway, he's in room C, why don't you go and get inside his head.”

He pushed himself up off the desk and leered at me. “And the Batmobile's got a ticket again,”

he said, before heading off towards his office.

“He's still got it in for you, hasn't he?” asked Filbin, as he picked up the phone and began to dial.

I didn't reply, just grabbed my briefcase and headed for the interview rooms.

I was in room C for the best part of two hours and I felt sick when I came out. Sick and dirty and tainted. The man was insane, no doubt about it and the program labelled him as suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, and I knew that Captain Canonico would not take the news kindly. I sympathised with him. I hated child-killers more than any other type of murderer, hated them with a vengeance. If I'd had my way I'd quite happily give the bastard a bimedial leucotomy there and then with a broken bottle, but that's not the way the American justice system works. There were times when I hated the job, and hated even more the people it brought me into contact with.

There's no excuse for killing children. None. I went straight to my office and drew up the report and put it in a file and then dropped it into the internal mailing system because I didn't want to be around when Canonico got hold of it.

He'd never forgiven me for what happened a few years back when I was on one of my first cases. The Teen Killers, they called them, two nasty pieces of work who'd ended up in a cell together at San Quentin, both of them serving time for rape. They spent several years telling each other stories of rapes they'd committed and planning what they'd do when they got out. They came up with this great idea, that they'd buy a large van and use it to kidnap and rape girls, but to make it a bit more exciting they'd go out with the intention of getting girls of every age between thirteen and nineteen. It was a sort of game. A contest. A full set, nothing less would do. Their names were Ed Vincent and Ronnie Bryant but after the third rape the media began calling them The Teen Killers. It was Vincent's idea that the girls should be buggered as well as being raped, and it was Bryant's idea to fit up a video camera and lights in the back of the van so that they could film what they did to the girls. It was never really known which one of them decided that the girls should be strangled with their own underwear because when they eventually came to trial they both blamed each other.

Vincent was the smarter of the two, he had an IQ of 154, and in court Bryant said that he fallen under his influence and that it was all Vincent's doing. They got caught after the fifth murder. The MO had been the same in each case, the naked bodies were discovered by the side of a freeway with a number written on their back in lipstick. The number was the age of the girl. Within a year of them both being released they'd killed a thirteen-year-old, a fifteen-year-old, a seventeen-yearold,

an eighteen-year-old and a nineteen-year-old. They'd almost got the set, Vincent told me, and he seemed more upset at missing out on his target than the fact that he was facing the death penalty.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, they were picked up in a bar in Hollywood and I was called in to run them through the Beaverbrook program. You've got to remember that this was some time ago and that the program wasn't as sophisticated as it is now. Or as accurate. It wasn't a bug in the programming, it was more the fact that I didn't have enough case histories input as comparisons.

That's what I told Canonico, anyway. Not that it did me any good. I ran them both through the program and it highlighted a number of mental abnormalities which I reckoned were serious enough to justify the men being held in a secure hospital rather than a prison. Canonico protested and demanded a second opinion, I insisted that any further examinations were carried out in a hospital and they were put into separate vans and driven over to a secure institution near Santa Ana.

There was a cock-up, Vincent escaped, and was on the run for ten days. During that time he picked up a fourteen-year-old girl, manacled her in the back of his van, and filmed himself raping,

buggering and finally strangling her. They caught him in a motel outside Palmdale, watching the video and playing with himself. Canonico forced me to watch the video, right the way through,

slapping me around the face every time I tried to get out of the chair and away from the images of pain and terror and the little girl's unheeded tears.

He'd never forgiven me for the girl's death, and I didn't expect that he ever would. It wasn't my fault, I knew that, and when Vincent eventually went in front of a panel of psychiatrists they came to the same conclusion as I had and he ended up in a secure mental hospital. Bryant was executed a year or so ago when his appeals ran out.

Filbin was still at his desk working his way through the city's knife retailers and I asked him if De'Ath was still talking to the Ferriman girl. He shook his head and said that he'd gone to the Coroner's Office to see how the autopsy on the victim was going. I left the building quickly without bumping into Canonico, which almost made up for the fact that I had indeed been given a parking ticket. Somebody had impaled a clove of garlic on my aerial and I pulled it off and threw it into the gutter. The vampire joke had worn thin a long time ago.

When I arrived at the lab where the Coroner was working away on the victim of the previous night's murder I parked the Alpine next to De'Ath's car. Inside a receptionist told me that Black De'Ath had gone into the lab where the body was being sliced up and analysed. I said I'd wait outside because I'd seen more than my fair share of corpses being cut up and to be honest they always made me feel pretty queasy. I'd never actually thrown up, but why take the risk? After half an hour or so a grey haired man in green overalls came out carrying a tape-recorder, followed by De'Ath. De'Ath raised his eyebrows when he saw me.

“I was curious,” I explained. “I just wanted to know what the autopsy showed.”

“Knife through the heart,” said De'Ath. “Slash to the throat came afterwards. We've got a pretty good idea of the shape of the knife that did the damage.”

“So what's the plan? Get hold of a knife like the missing one and compare it with the shape suggested by the autopsy?”

“Man, you should be a detective,” laughed De'Ath. "I'm not sure how much good it's going to do us. I asked her about the knife. She said that when she rented the apartment the knife was already missing, and she said she could prove it. In one of the drawers of the kitchen there should be a full itinerary of everything in the flat, dated when she took on the lease. Maybe we missed it.

I'm on my way there now." He saw the look on my face and wagged his finger before I could speak. “If you want to tag along, that's OK with me, but don't let the Captain find out about it,” he said.

On the way out he waved his notebook in front of me. “There is something else you should know,“ he said. ”Victim was drained of blood. Most of it anyway.”

“What?” I was shocked, but then realised that he was probably building up to another vampire joke.

“There was hardly any blood left in his body. Now that's not all that surprising considering that he'd been stabbed in the chest, but there wasn't more than a pint or so in his clothes or on the ground where we found the body. And like I said, the girl's clothes were clean.” He stopped by his car and unlocked the door.

“You're not going to tell me he was bitten by a vampire, are you, Samuel?”

He roared with laughter and slapped the roof of his car with the flat of his hand. “You've been mixing with weirdos for too long, man. You're going over the edge.” He laughed again and shook his head. “What it means, Van Helsing, is that he was almost certainly killed somewhere else and then dumped in the alley.” He got into his car, still laughing.

As I followed him down the road to Terry's apartment I could see him still shaking with laughter and shaking his head.

He let us into her apartment and I waited by the hi-fi while he put on another pair of polythene gloves and carefully went through the draws in the kitchenette. “Yeah, here it is,” he said, fishing out a sheet of paper. “A full inventory.” He looked at the knife rack and counted them off. Six knifes in the rack, six knives on the list. Dated six months ago." He folded the list up and slid it into a polythene bag and put it in his inside pocket. He pulled a plastic carrier bag out of the drawer and carefully put the knives into it. “Right, that's us,” he said.

“Give me one minute,” I said and headed for the bedroom.

“Don't...” he began.

“I know, don't touch anything,” I yelled back at him. I was playing a hunch, don't ask me why,

but I just wanted to get the name of the man in the photograph. The film star. Greig Turner it said on the back of the chair and I scribbled the name down on the back of one of my business cards.

“What are you up to, Doc?” De'Ath asked as I returned to the lounge.

“Nothing. Nothing important,” I said. “You fancy a drink?”

He looked at his wristwatch, a Seiko electronic job with lots of buttons. “Yeah, you've talked me into it. I know a place near here, come on.”

De'Ath knew a place no matter where you were in Greater California. He locked the bag of knives in his trunk and we walked to a place on Sunset, a narrow bar with stools and a barman in a green and gold waistcoat and a sniffle like he had an expensive habit, if you get my drift. He brought us a couple of cold beers and we clinked glasses while the barman retreated to a tactful distance.